[Noffle-devel] Oh dear, what feature freeze?

[Jim H. <jim...@ac...>]

I didn't really intend to make any more major changes before 1.2, but...

I've just checked in a whole bunch of stuff. Some of it is good - fixes
to bugs reported by Noffle's new Debian packager, Martin Godish (thanks again,
Martin).

But I also got carried away and implemented simple authentication within the
server. Y'see, a friend who has written a Windows news reader got a bug report
against Noffle and wanted a server to test against. And I've kind-of wanted to
have a Noffle facing the Big Wide World for other reasons, but I'm not in the
business of running public news servers...

So, AUTHINFO USER and AUTHINFO PASS are now supported. Authentication mechanism
is determined at compile time, and can be either a plain text user/password
file, or for when you want something cleverer, PAM.

After some egging on from Martin, I've also gone all pompous about who can run
certain Noffle commands. Basically, unless you're root or news you won't be
allowed to run admin-type Noffle commands (subscribe/unsubscribe, delete
articles/groups etc.) Noffle also tries a lot harder now to detect if it does
not have the permissions it expects and gives civilised error messages.

It all vaguely seems to work, but I'd be grateful for some more folk bashing on
it.

-- 
Jim Hague - jim...@in... (Work), ji...@be... (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift or you don't control.